Review: Social Business in Action: Trigonos in Eryri – Richard Grover, Judy Harris, Ros Tennyson

Desmond Clifford

While we’re waiting for the robots to take over, the question of what we’ll all do for a living, and how we’ll do it, is very pertinent.

The AI revolution has barely begun. When it gets seriously underway, there’s a chance it will blow away some of the economic assumptions of the last couple of hundred years.

If industrial capitalism is entering its final phase, now feels like a good time to investigate alternatives like the social business model.

This book is a prospectus of sorts, a set of reflections on a social business established in the mid 1990s in the Nantlle Valley.

“Trigonos” is a residential events and hospitality centre, geared towards well-being activity, on 18 acres developed as a biodynamic farm to supply the business.

Altruistic

As a social business, the venture had no shareholders or owners, and no conventional need to make profit. Nor was it a charity, so it wasn’t answerable to officialdom in any form. Trigonos was run by three people acting collectively from altruistic motives. They began their work without a settled manifesto and they confess that they didn’t precisely understand what they were trying to do, at least at the outset.

As the venture took root, they developed the site while training and employing local people in an area where jobs are scarce. They committed to good employment practise, no zero hours contracts, pay above the minimum wage and only a 35% pay differential between the highest and lowest paid. Over time, the three “directors” – a word heavy with bureaucratic implications, but that was their legal designation – developed a kind-of business approach based on three pillars: economic viability, social inclusion and individual development. It was idealistic but seems to have worked for them in their own terms.

Freed from the need to make profit, they aimed instead to produce “financial surplus” which they then reinvested into the business.

The directors and members of their families worked together as a collective. They were friends and each contributed to the business in areas of natural aptitude and interest.

Vision

This can work among like-minded people who share a vision but would be difficult to engineer or sustain in more conventional circumstances. It made me think of a secular monastery or convent.

The three directors developed a shared leadership model, “an alternative to the dominance of a notion of leadership as a hierarchy of authority.”

The experience was by no means all positive and they describe some of the pitfalls they faced. They received poor financial advice and sudden changes in tax rules, a perennial aggravation for any business, caused them serious problems.

They recognised that they were “English incomers” in a conspicuously Welsh-speaking part of the country; “some were suspicious of our motives, giving rise to a low level of local hostility for our first few years.”

This self-awareness is refreshing.  They felt that they achieved “acceptance” by the local community over time through offering jobs and training and access to facilities, though there’s a sense of tentativeness about the depth of integration.

Idealism

This is an unusual publication. The Trigonos project was clearly the product of intense idealism and conviction. The directors are honest in saying they didn’t fully know what they were doing and felt their way forward through trial and error.

In fairness, so do many businesses, including the super successful. They must have worked immensely hard to make progress and their slightly stilted writing style surely underplays the intensity of their effort and, I should think, the human anxiety that went with it. They established a viable business, employed people, and helped stimulate a local economy through their enterprise.

What the book lacks is compelling narrative. It is illustrated with beautiful photos and Nantlle Valley is as lovely a spot as anywhere in the country; you can see why people want to be there.

Frustratingly, we learn little, really, about the three people who set up the project.

I would like to have learnt more about their backgrounds. What motivated them? How did they become friends? What sustained them when the going got tough, as it surely must have done along the way?

After 20 years, the original directors aged and looked to hand Trigonos on to others.

They lament that no one among the local staff was willing to step up into director roles and, finally, the company was gifted to the Ruskin Mill Trust, an educational charity which fitted well with the founding vision.

All the same, it seems a pity that the local community was unable to assume stewardship of the venture directly.

Again, I would like to have heard more about this context. If locals were unwilling to step up, why was that?

Weakness

If after 20 years of apparent success, the venture wasn’t thoroughly integrated into the community, does this suggest a weakness of some sort in the model? Or, indeed, a weakness in the community?

It would have been interesting to hear directly from some of those local voices, an important, but in this account, silent, part of the story.

Nevertheless, the document is thought-provoking and has insights for those interested in the social business concept. The authors are modest but were clearly industrious and committed altruists.

A stronger narrative might have broadened its appeal but, before the robots dispense with us completely, the social business model may be an alternative worth thinking about.

Social Business in Action: Trigonos in Eryri is published by Y Lolfa and can be purchased here